On Sat, 24 Nov 2001, Jake Patterson wrote:
>
> Yep. Unless you go with something like seven block high characters, you
> simply cannot have certain letters lowercase, and certain other ones will
> be too high compaired to others. Even then, decenders (gjpqy) are still a
> big problem. The PF is just too low resolution to do lowercase well.
>
At risk of overcomplicating things... it would be kind of cool to do 7 or
8 line fonts with lowercase, and scroll the crib screen instead of trying
to fit it all in there. I could turn it into a full set of instructions
instead of just a score list.. An 8-line proportional font would be enough
for lowercase to look OK (one line for descenders) and I could steal
characters from an Atari 800 OS ROM dump :)
> You are correct, that is called "blooming" I think, and is usually the
> result of the power supply being too cheap, or so I have read somewhere.
> I am so spoiled by the LCD display on my Powerbook, I failed to anticipate
> that.
>
Hm. Every CRT I've ever seen suffers from this at least a little bit. LCD's
don't, but the only LCD displays I've got are a 9" active matrix on a
pentium 90 laptop, and a 12" passive matrix on a p-150mmx.. not exactly
my development platforms of choice (though the 150 runs xstella full
speed, the passive matrix display smears horribly when objects move..)
Anyway I think *all* TV's have worse blooming than a run-of-the-mill CRT
SVGA monitor these days.. Have to take it into account, since the 2600
is usually going to be hooked up to a TV.
> > Wouldn't be all that difficult to score during the game, I guess..
> > There's enough time to score one hand per frame, and I'm only allowing
> > the cards to be placed on every 16th frame.. The routine will have to
> > know to skip card #52 (the blank card), that's easy enough.
>
> My thought was not counting the score for a hand until it is complete, but
> that may actually be harder since you would have to add a routine to
> recognize that... actually, it would probably be about the same dificulty.
>
I think I'd rather have a running total.. Hm. I may actually not have enough
RAM left. The current scoring system uses one byte of persistent storage
between frames, and each hand's score value just gets added to this, one
hand per frame. I guess it'd make more sense if I'd just post the source,
which I will do probably tomorrow.
> Scoring the diagonals would change my playing stratagy...
Hmmm. I'll have to try this with a deck of cards later.. I haven't ever
actually played this way.
>
> I can see it now: "Euchre, Poker Solitare, and Double King Pede" wait,
> Double King Pede? What's that!? (Serously obscure, search for "double
> king pede" on google, and you will get *one* hit, and it's a PDF file of
> a Springfield, Vermont town report. According to google, Euchre is 74,700
> times more popular)
>
>
If you hadn't told me it was a card game, I'd think `double king pede' was
some variation of Centipede/Millipede :)
If we were going to release a multi-cart of card games, I suppose it'd be
nice to include some more generic games, like plain old Poker, or Gin, or
Klondike solitaire (a.k.a. C:\WINDOWS\SOL.EXE)... though I dunno how you'd
display 7 cards across the screen (could use a 48-pixel-wide display a la
the 6-digit score, with 6 pixels per card... but where the #^%&*%^ would you
find enough RAM for screen memory?)
Glenn was talking about doing Uno, there might be copyright issues, but
we're not really trying to make a profit on this... though I was at a used
game store today that has 2-300 2600 carts for sale, and 4-5 of the consoles.
They said they might be interested in stocking a homebrew game, if it were
pre-packaged, but they'd want to sell them on consignment.
Anyway, this is probably me just running my mouth... Producing a boxed set
or multicart in a box would probably be beyond my abilities/time.
B.
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